Bedale Town Council Consultation Case Study
Bedale TC has had a website with us for a long time, and as their council is so large with so many different responsibilities, the site had become dated and quite daunting to navigate. As the site has been in use for a long time, some of their content was out of date, or just needed updating. The site was also not utilising some of WCS'' great features, as they were not released when their site was first built! The Council Staff were keeping the site well, but felt that some of the pages that had not been updated could do with a refresh. This is why we have undertaken the Bedale Town Council website as a Web Consultation project.
Initial Consultation
Firstly, we organised a consultation meeting with staff members of Bedale Town Council to discuss the purpose of the website. We discussed how the website was currently being used, what parts of it worked well, and which needed to be reimagined.
We took time to listen to the needs of the site's current admins and users and took into consideration the fact that the admins have gotten used to the current workflow of their site, so we were to avoid doing too many changes to the structure of the back end of the site.
Utilising Analytical Information
Our first step in updating the site was using the site's analytics to help us understand what pages of the site users were mostly looking for. Doing this helps us to streamline the site, and help people find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. We found that the most commonly visited pages of the site were the Car Boot Sale page, the Bedale Markets page, and the Tourist Information Centre page. Knowing this, we decided to add buttons to the homepage that will quickly navigate users to those pages.
Employing Great WCS Features
Our Web Communication System contains some fantastic features catered to the needs of Organisations, Local Government Bodies, and Charities.
Profiles
One of these features is our 'Profiles', offering multiple different ways of displaying information about members of the organisations. The Bedale Town Council Website was created before our Profiles feature was released, so the Council were using a simple table to display the names and contact details of their Councillors. We moved all Contact Information, Profile Pictures, and Bio's to be displayed using our Profiles feature. Profiles are edited outside of the page using our Profiles Editor. This means whenever a member joins, leaves, or changes their details, it is easy to make these changes, which will be automatically updated on every page the profiles are displayed on.
Add-Ons
Our Add Ons feature has proven a very helpful navigation tool on WCS websites. They can help link users to related pages, find information quickly, and can be used to display information in multiple places. Add-Ons are also edited outside of the page, in the Add-On editor. We chose to add any contact information that would display on multiple pages into an add-on, so if the member of staff or their details change, it only needs to be done once. We also created an Add On to display the date of the next meeting and its agenda. This means that the site admins only need to add this information to the site once.
Galleries
There were many images on the Bedale Town Council site, many of them displayed on the page with no Alt Text, description, or responsive formatting. This made the images not only inaccessible but also unresponsive to different screen sizes, meaning images were falling off the page and making it difficult to use the site on mobile devices. We went ahead and added these images into our Galleries feature, creating galleries with image titles and descriptions. Our Galleries feature is responsive to different screen sizes, responds to image sizing, and helps to add different types of content to a site.
Streamlining & Usability
Site Navigation
We worked hard to make sure that the Main Navigation Menu was easy to use, and made sense.
We tried to group the pages into sections, 'The Council' holding all of the information about the Town Council, Its Meetings, Minutes, Policy Documents, etc.
We then grouped more pages into 'Bedale Town', holding information about Visiting the Town, The Markets, Car Boot Sales, and the Hall and Museum.
Finally, we made two more menu items- 'Community', holding all information about services available to Bedale Residents including the Minibus, Library, and Allotments and 'Out and About', holding information about things to do in and around Bedale, including walking routes and the Wensleydale Railway. We decided for usability keeping all information about The Council in one place, separate from the rest of the content of the site, will help users find what they need quickly. Along with that, we hope that the other groupings will help users navigate to their preferred page.
Page Formatting
Some pages on the site are not edited very often, pages like the Public Toilets page and the History of the Wensleydale Railway page contain information that will not change- these pages we decided to format to be slightly more complicated, using HTML and CSS code to achieve this. This does mean that from the back end, these pages are slightly more complicated. Choosing the unchanging pages to do this with means they not only look fantastic, but they will also not add any extra work for the site admins.
Accessibility
Once we had finished our work on the site we ran a full Accessibility check on the site.
This included checking alt-text on every image to make sure it is accurate and helpful, along with checking the quality of those images.
We checked that all links included on the site were directed to the correct place, and were correctly included in the text along with the current guidelines regarding links.
Published: 04/07/2022 Published by: WJPS
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